Friday, September 5, 2014

Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum

The Sylloge Nummorum
Graecorum is a British Academy
Research Project, the purpose of which is to publish illustrated catalogues
of Greek coins in public and private collections in the British Isles.

SNG has retained the traditional, very broad, definition of 'Greek' to include
the coins produced by all ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean and
neighbouring regions except Rome, though it does include the Roman
Provincial series often known as 'Greek Imperials'.

The project was inaugurated in 1931 with the publication of the collection of Capt. E.G.
Spencer-Churchill. A new and distinctive format was used, with text and
illustrations on facing pages. This meant that only limited text was
included, with the illustrations having greater prominence than in earlier
types of catalogues, and to some extent replacing textual descriptions. This
is because the primary purpose of SNG was to make much more material
available for study. This format has been retained ever since and has been
adopted, along with the title Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, for similar
projects in many other countries, including Denmark, France, Germany,
Greece, Israel, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.

To date, the British SNG project has published over 30 fascicules from many different public and
private collections, and the total world-wide exceeds 120 volumes. The
project is supported by the Union Académique Internationale and information
on SNG activities world-wide is now co-ordinated by the International
Numismatic Commission. The SNG format has effectively become standard
for the cataloguing of Greek coins for academic study, and it has also been
adopted for other series, e.g. the Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles
(SCBI).

While the output of the Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum project has traditionally
been volumes of text and plates, in recent years digital recording of this
material has begun to take place. A relational database application has been
funded by The British Academy specifically for the recording of numismatic data
and this application forms the basis of the electronic publication of this data
on the WWW.

This does not indicate a change in the aims of SNG but rather a recognition that
the information SNG publishes should be available in forms other than printed
books.
Currently some 25,000 coins from the Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum volumes are
online in the form of a searchable database. The original data has been
normalised to ensure consistent searches across the volumes. Eventually the
database may be expanded to include unpublished material. The application will
thus provide hugely increased access to SNG data.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.